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Why this film? Why now?

In a recent episode of The Americans, the main characters watch in 1983, along with 100 million other non-fictional Americans, one of the most influential made-for-TV movies: The Day After, directed by Nicolas Meyer fresh off of directing Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. If the world had changed forever the day the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, you wouldn't have necessarily known it if, in 1983, you were watching football practice from the stadium stands in Kansas. Americans had internalized the dread that had been hanging over them since the USSR developed their own nuclear capacity. For decades the US and the USSR were locked in a morbid game with the apt acronym: M.A.D., Mutually Assured Destruction. But against that backdrop, life carried on.

Philip and Elizabeth from The Americans can't imagine as they watch The Day After that the US president and the new leader of the USSR will take major steps to defuse tensions simmering for decades between those two nations, that they will sign significant treaties reducing their arsenals, that the Berlin Wall will fall in 1989, and that people born after these events will grow up without the same existential angst that forged the outlooks of people born during the height of the Cold War. People watching all across the US in the supposed safety of their living rooms that night in 1983 couldn't imagine that the film they were watching would likely change the course of the Cold War.

Since 1947, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has maintained a symbolic clock to mark our collective progress or regress in area of nuclear threat to humanity. In 1991, the clock read 17 minutes to midnight in recognition of the momentous changes in the 1980s. This January, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock was advanced to two-and-one-half minutes to midnight in response to many deteriorating conditions, including the uncertainty signaled by the new US administration to continue to pursue policies of non-proliferation or of first-strike use of nuclear weapons.

In this shadow, the Global Peace Film Festival reached out to Nicholas Meyer, the director of The Day After, to screen and discuss the film as part of the festival's 15 year-long mission to model peaceful alternatives to war and to inspire ordinary people to take actions to make their world a better place. We feel it is incumbent upon all people of good faith to consider frankly and unflinchingly what is at stake with the use nuclear weapons. We cannot look away, but neither can we allow the enormity of crisis to paralyze us. Once before we found ourselves at a similar precipice, but found a way to pull back. In re-watching The Day After we hope to ignite discussions and inspire actions that lead us away from the edge.